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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I discovered this story long ago and it has lingered with me since then. The so-called “summer people” are a couple from New York, who occupy the same remote country cottage each year. During this visit, in place of returning home, they decide to prolong their holiday for a month longer – something that seems to disturb everyone in the surrounding community. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has ever stayed in the area beyond the end of summer. Nonetheless, the couple are resolved to not leave, and that is the moment events begin to get increasingly weird. The person who supplies fuel won’t sell for them. Nobody will deliver groceries to the cabin, and at the time the family endeavor to drive into town, the car refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the energy of their radio die, and when night comes, “the elderly couple huddled together within their rental and expected”. What might be this couple waiting for? What might the residents know? Every time I read this author’s unnerving and inspiring narrative, I’m reminded that the finest fright stems from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this brief tale two people journey to an ordinary beach community where church bells toll the whole time, a constant chiming that is irritating and puzzling. The initial very scary scene takes place at night, when they opt to take a walk and they fail to see the ocean. There’s sand, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and salt, surf is audible, but the sea seems phantom, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and whenever I go to the coast in the evening I recall this tale that ruined the ocean after dark for me – positively.

The young couple – she’s very young, he’s not – return to their lodging and find out the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and demise and innocence meets grim ballet chaos. It is a disturbing meditation on desire and deterioration, two bodies aging together as partners, the attachment and aggression and gentleness of marriage.

Not just the most terrifying, but perhaps one of the best brief tales out there, and an individual preference. I read it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of Aickman stories to be released in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this book beside the swimming area overseas a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I felt an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the thrill of anticipation. I was writing my third novel, and I had hit a block. I was uncertain if it was possible a proper method to compose some of the fearful things the book contains. Going through this book, I understood that there was a way.

Published in 1995, the novel is a grim journey into the thoughts of a criminal, the protagonist, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who slaughtered and cut apart 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee over a decade. As is well-known, Dahmer was obsessed with producing a compliant victim that would remain him and made many macabre trials to achieve this.

The acts the novel describes are terrible, but just as scary is the emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s dreadful, broken reality is simply narrated with concise language, names redacted. The audience is plunged stuck in his mind, compelled to see mental processes and behaviors that appal. The foreignness of his thinking resembles a bodily jolt – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Starting this book is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and eventually began experiencing nightmares. Once, the terror involved a vision where I was trapped inside a container and, upon awakening, I discovered that I had torn off a part off the window, attempting to escape. That building was crumbling; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall became inundated, insect eggs dropped from above into the bedroom, and at one time a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in that space.

After an acquaintance handed me this author’s book, I had moved out at my family home, but the narrative regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs appeared known to myself, longing as I was. It is a novel concerning a ghostly noisy, sentimental building and a female character who eats chalk from the cliffs. I loved the novel deeply and came back repeatedly to its pages, always finding {something